For the Met, Opera History Lives in a Newark Parking Lot

In a storage yard owned by a trucking company called Daybreak Express, stagehands from the Met clean parts of the set of “Andrea Chénier,” which is going back into the repertory this season.

Richard Perry / The New York Times

By JAMES BARRON

August 16, 2013

NEWARK — The costumes were all wrong for “Andrea Chénier.” At the center of the action were men in white protective suits, not tailcoats and breeches, and they were aiming high-pressure hoses at pieces of the set. Not one of them sang a note.

This was not the Metropolitan Opera’s usual “Chénier.”

In an out-of-the-way parking lot here in what one Met official called “ ‘Sopranos’ country” — and he was not talking about the ones who sing — the stagehands from the carpentry department were doing the Met’s version of housecleaning, readying the backdrop of an opera that the house has not performed in six years.

They offered a glimpse into the complex preparations that go into the Met’s season, which begins on Sept. 23 with the first of 218 performances of 26 different operas. They also provided a reminder of the potential headaches and the expenses that come with running a repertory company that never performs the same opera two nights in a row.

Ever since the last performance of “Chénier” in 2007, the sets have been packed in shipping containers in a storage yard owned by a trucking company called Daybreak Express, which shares its name with a Duke Ellington song. The Met has 1,300 containers at the yard, all air- and water-tight. “Chénier” fills eight.

“We are their warehouse,” John Scerbo, the executive vice president of Daybreak Express, said one day this week. “If you were to put this stuff in a regular warehouse, you’d need over a million square feet.”

Stephen Diaz, the Met’s master carpenter, at the storage yard, where the Met has 1,300 containers.

Richard Perry / The New York Times

“Chénier” is going back into the repertory this season, so the stage crew did what it does whenever the Met revives a production. Stagehands removed the locks on each container and checked for dust and damage. (Hence the protective gear.) Stephen Diaz, the Met’s master carpenter, led the way into one container. The air was slightly musty.

“This is not bad,” he said, “but you have to get the smell out. Singers are sensitive to smell, especially the principals. You have to make sure they’re comfortable.”

So the stage crew hauled the set into the parking lot, piece by piece. Someone turned on the hoses, spraying bleach and odor eliminator on columns and arches that were left to dry in the sun.

The Met keeps the makings of about 100 different productions here: sets broken down into pieces marked with instructions for speedy assembly at Lincoln Center. The containers for an opera are trucked to Lincoln Center just before it goes into rehearsal, and the sets remain at the Met until after the season’s last performance of that opera. The Met has some backstage storage space; Mr. Diaz said that he usually has the sets for four to seven operas on hand at any given time — about 80 containers’ worth.

The Met, which struggled financially during the recession, will not say how much it pays for storage or transport. But the Met’s repertory means that there are times when a marathon of trucks is coming and going, as the stage crew knocks down one set and takes in the next one. “It is a 24/7 operation when they are in season,” said Larry Pucciarello, who coordinates the logistics for Daybreak Express. “They’re on the phone: ‘Where’s this truck? Where’s that truck?’ ”

Only once in 30 years of what Mr. Diaz calls “containerizing” — until the 1980s, the Met ran its own warehouse, in Weehawken, N.J. — has a truck been stolen. In the 1990s, thieves broke into a depot, probably hoping for a load of televisions, not part of the set for “Turandot.” The stolen container was never found, said Mr. Diaz, who had to do an inventory of the 18 other containers to figure out what to replace before that “Turandot” could be staged again.

Some props discarded by the Met adorn a building at Daybreak Express.

Richard Perry / The New York Times

The Met has thinned out its holdings in recent years, retaining only one production of most operas, although it has held on to multiple versions of a few for historical reasons or for their value, among them the Mark Chagall production of Mozart’s “Zauberflöte,” which had its premiere in 1967, during the Met’s first season at Lincoln Center. But Mr. Diaz discarded the David Hockney sets for a 1990s production of that same opera after the staging by Julie Taymor went into the repertory nine years ago.

Other containers hold the trappings of two “Toscas,” the classic Franco Zeffirelli version and the one by the French director Luc Bondy that replaced it in 2009, and two “Ring” cycles. Pieces of the “Ring” machine, the problem-plagued device that served as a set in the most recent staging of these four Wagner operas, were stored here after it was disassembled in May; other components were sent to a climate-controlled warehouse in Newburgh, N.Y.

But the Met still has 25 containers loaded with the Otto Schenk “Ring” cycle, which first went into production in the 1980s. (It is now on the list of productions to be disposed of, but it is not clear how soon that will happen.)

Mr. Diaz said the storage yard had “long-term positions and short-term positions.” Referring to Mr. Scerbo of Daybreak Express, he explained the difference: “I send him an opera that we’re not doing for five years, he goes long term. An opera like ‘Bohème,’ that we’ll do every year, he’ll go short term.”

Until the Met moved to Lincoln Center from Broadway and 39th Street in 1966, it stored its sets in the open, propping them against the Seventh Avenue side of the house. When it rained, the sets could get wet, or at least damp.

With the move uptown, “the intention was to have the whole season’s repertory in the building at the beginning of the season,” Mr. Diaz said. Most of the sets in those days were flat and could be rolled up; now, almost all the sets are three-dimensional, and cannot be.

“One of the larger shows there was ‘Madame Butterfly,’ ” Mr. Diaz said, “which was one of the smallest shows here.” The “Butterfly” that migrated to Lincoln Center and remained in the repertory until 1993 filled two storage containers. The Anthony Minghella “Butterfly” that had its premiere at the Met in 2006 takes eight.